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Hard Drive Speed and HD playback

Has anyone else hit bottlenecks on the speed of their hard drive? I have an old IDE 7200rpm hard drive on my system. When I am playing back HD video I've been having problems if something else is using the hard drive heavily at the same time. The CPU usage is always relatively low.

Recently the problem for me was when CCExtractor kicked off on a finished recording while I was watching another HD recording. It became unwatchable. For now, I've taken CCExtractor out of my PostProcessing.bat file. This made the playback much better, but it would still stutter occasionally when comskip was running at the same time.
I've also run into problems when recording 2 HD shows while watching another, but that has been a lot less common occurrence.

I'm debating between just getting a newer, faster SATA hard drive or setting up a RAID 0 array (which I'd like to avoid). It seems like hard drive speed hasn't been an issue for a PVR setup in the past, but the HD transistion may be pushing traditional hard drives too far.

i find it's more about the amount of cache and fragmentation than speed.. as long as you have a 7200 rpm then thruput should be ok, and not having much free space also leads to lots of headslapping [long seeks] that hampers multitasking....

i've resorted to using multiple drives for recording, using ntfs links so everything still looks like it's in same dir... main recording drive only has 16 meg cache..
[NTFSLinker helper util]

i have a 32 meg cache drive that doesn't seem to suffer from the multitasking problems near as much tho, and all else is same about the drives...still, dividing up the recording chores seems to really do the trick, can do as many as you want same time as they're all on separate disks.. i keep about 4 spots to record to and try to always have simultaneous records go to diff drives for max effect...
only have to setup once for a series, only works on series level..[whole dirs]